Introduction to 3ds Max 2011

Now let's start creating and applying some simple materials. All right, so we've got our material editor open, and we've got our model. And I've just opened up the group, so selecting that, I was going to group it open so that we can access some of these different pieces if we want to just select things and be able to view that. I could open up that group as well if I want to select a particular piece here so that we can isolate that a little bit more. So let's start to add some material. So we know we want to have a material for this outer part of the engine. So I'm going to go ahead and jump up here. If you'd like to use the compact material editor, you can certainly do that. But I'm just going to go up to Standard and create a standard material. Let's pull that into our view. I'm going to double click on this. I can rename this, so we call this something like pod engine outer, and just put some underscores in here, so we can see that a little bit better, what that is. We can apply this. So if we have this selected, we can go ahead and just right click on this, say Assign Material to Selection. So now we have that material assigned. We can go into the parameters. If we want to change the color, just to get a rough idea of what we want it to look like, maybe kind of a saturated, kind of a darker red color. Something like that. You can change that. If I want to add a little bit of specularity, maybe we can do that. A little bit less. So we can change all of those parameters. I'm not going to add any maps to this yet. You can see how that's mirrored, or you can see how that appears in our view port. Our material's now added. If we jump down here, we can see that we now have, since this has been applied, we now have a material in our seam material. So if I actually come in here in our view, and take this material and delete it, it's just deleted out of our view. You can see it's actually still on our object, and it's still listed on our seam materials. So we can actually just drag this back out, and let's just make it instance, and view this in our view and continue to work on it. So just keep that in mind. If you come in and accidentally delete some of these things from our view, if you've applied it to your models in your seam, it's still going exist, and you're still going to be able to access it from your seam materials. Let's go ahead and continue on, creating some more materials. I'm just going to stick with the standard material for now. And this one, let's go ahead and call this one the engine inner. So call this pod engine inner. Now, if we go over to our compact material editor, you can see we don't really have any materials loaded up in here. So what we can do is come up to one of these preview slots, and let's say Pick From Object. So we'll pick this material from our external, our engine. And so you can see now, in this previous slot, we're viewing the pod engine outer material. Now, these little triangles on the corners let us know that that material's being used in our seam here. So just keep that in mind. It's kind of similar to the view, as far as the fact that this isn't really your actual material, it's kind of just a preview. So if we jump back in here, we can go ahead and grab our object, it's around F4, so we see what we've grabbed here, and let's assign that. And now I just want to continue on kind of breaking things apart. So we want a material for our cord, or our cables. So again, go ahead and double click on that. Call this pod cables. Maybe we can make it just a little bit darker for now. And then we just want to come in, select those cables, and assign a material. So we're going to be using standard materials a lot. There are some other materials that we'll touch on, but we want to just use the basics for now, till we get into maybe some of the mental ray materials and so forth. We've also got this pod-- I want to go ahead and open up that group, so I can see what we've got here. This is going to be the outer portion of the pod, or the cockpit here. So let's just go ahead and just drag this in. And I want this to be named, we'll call it pod cockpit. And I want to add the same color here. So I want to have the same sort of color. So if we want to, actually, instead of creating a new material, you can actually take this, shift, drag this over, to create a copy of this. So if I wanted to create a copy for the base with that same base color, we could actually do that. And so doing that, instead of creating a new one, we can call this-- rename that to our original name. And now it has the same color, we just need to assign it. So as we add these, they're getting added to the seam materials list. Let's go ahead and add a material, and so we're starting to think now about what pieces we want to be what. I actually want the underneath portion of this outer shell to be kind of glowing. So let's create a material for that. And we'll go ahead, and I'm going to create a standard material. And these aren't going to stay standard for very long, at least some of them aren't. But I just want to break everything out, separate it out into the different pieces here. And so this, I'm just going to call this the red glow. And for now we'll just give it kind of a bright red color, so we know exactly what it is. We'll give it a little bit of self illumination here. So we can see that kind of red glow there. And let's assign this to this piece. It's going to have a nice glow from underneath. Now looking at this, we're going to be assigning materials in here. We're going also be doing some UV work on the different pieces. So, in this case, I'm going to isolate some of the things that I have going, as far as the engines. I'm going to isolate those, so just use one cable and one engine. But you can see if I select this, it's not really deleting. And that's due to a little bit of a bug here. We've got the slate material editor minimized. And so you can see, if I go ahead and bring that up, I've got it maximized. Now I can go ahead and delete that so. Just keep that in mind when you're working with your material editor-- you may want to close that out when you're not working in it. So let's go through the process, and I want you to go through, and for instance, I want to have the same glow on here. So we can go back in and assign our red glow. And you can see that we've actually deleted that because of going through and deleting our engine. So that, again, it's just something to be aware of when you're working with that-- having that minimized. Sometimes it doesn't like that and you're going to be deleting your materials instead. So just keep that in mind. You want to go ahead and close this out, again, as I said. So let me go ahead and now I'll delete this again. And now we should be good to go here. We've still got our red material in. Let's select that. Let's, again, apply this. We could apply to multiple pieces. So let's go through and create materials for all of our pieces. We want to create materials for the material for the fan blades. We want to create a material for these pieces, and also for the fins. This can all be the same material. This as well. We want to have a material for all of the pipes. That can be a single material. A material for the cone, and for the slats back here. We want to have a material for these. And right now it doesn't matter what color they are. We just want to create those materials and get those materials assigned. So just go through that process, and then in the next lesson, we will look at adding some simple variation to our maps using some gradient. So we'll look at that in the next lesson.